OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
22hr ago
I will risk drama and say that I enjoyed V and VI more than IV.
IV just has too much that doesn't work that well in hindsight - in particular, IV has really bad and tedious combat.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I can't argue with that. I think a schema like this is reasonable in the abstract, but the moment you start positing regulating information on this basis, you run into the question of who judges.
I don't know if I have an absolute rule here, because it seems in principle reasonable for a government to act to curtail certain forms of false information (e.g. false advertising), as well as certain forms of malevolent communication (e.g. propaganda fron an enemy power), but I think I would want to permit those only to the minimum extent necessary.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I think that, regardless of objective statistics or anything, it is felt to be right-leaning by the kind of people who migrate to Bluesky.
Is it possible that they're just so used to unchallenged left-wing dominance that any presence of non-censored, non-battered-and-fearful conservative voices at all seems 'right-leaning' to them? Entirely plausible, to me.
But even if it's just illusionary or a product of absurd expectations of cultural dominance, that would still get you the Neutral vs Conservative effect, where the most extreme witches flee, create their own space, and that space ends up terrible.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
To me that seems much too broad, particularly since 'harm' is difficult to clearly define, and no one can reasonably foresee all the effects of their speech. For instance, is it malinformation for Lisa Simpson to tell Springfield that their beloved founder was a murderous pirate? It's true, and her intent is to promote historical truth and increase everyone's genuine knowledge of the past - her motive is disinterested truth-seeking, not to promote or conceal any political agenda. However, it's also clear that the knowledge will make most of the townspeople unhappy. Malinformation? What if the truth would do such damage to the town's annual festival as to cause real economic damage? That seems like real harm, at least in an economic sense. Malinformation?
Intuitively I feel like to be malinformation there has to be a motive that is, broadly speaking, malevolent - it has to be true information that is intended to in some way mislead or disadvantage the people receiving it, usually to further the agenda of the person revealing it.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
So this gives us four quadrants along two axes, right? The true/false axis and the benevolent/malevolent axis.
True and benevolent - information. Facts offered with the intent of illuminating another person or improving their understanding.
False and benevolent - some (but not all) misinformation. Offered with the intent of improving someone else's understanding, but failing in this regard due to good-faith error.
True and malevolent - malinformation. Facts offered in order to harm another or decrease their overall understanding, whether through selective choice of facts, removal of context, inflammatory content, or similar.
False and malevolent - disinformation (a subtype of misinformation). Offered with the intent of deluding another, decreasing their understanding, or causing them to take action based on false foundations.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Some are, certainly. More than zero of the people furiously angry at Singal are trans.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That's not quite what I'm talking about in the specific example of myself - I meet a lot more Muslims in person than I do Mormons. It's the identity claim that gets under my skin.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space, which predictably went badly, and now is evolving much stricter and harsher purity norms than even pre-Elon Twitter had. They attract only the refugees from a right-slanted system, and so they get not only progressives, but the worst and most extreme progressives.
There's almost a schadenfreude in it - "Ha! Now you know how it feels!"
Unless, of course, Twitter craters even more. Other possible dynamics are right-echo-chamber-Twitter and left-echo-chamber-Bluesky, both of similar reach and power, which I would take to be the worst of all worlds; or Twitter collapses entirely and Bluesky takes its place as the default short-messaging platform.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Well, yes, and I take the whole "heretics are more hated than infidels" observation to be the same distinction.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Anecdotally, I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter. Mormons and Muslims may both be wrong, and in fact the Muslims may be objectively more incorrect than the Mormons - but the Mormons try to pass themselves off as Christians, and the Muslims don't. The Mormons form a kind of threat to Christian identity or Christian unity in a way that the Muslims don't.
This may just be the barberpole model of fashion again. I'm a Christian, nobody is ever going to confuse me with a Muslim, but people might confuse me with a Mormon, and so I need to more militantly ostracise Mormons in order to make the distinction clear.
Or it might just be that I experience Mormons (or Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists or whoever) as in a sense making a 'direct' attack on who I am, whereas outsiders are not doing that.
If we jump from explicit religion to pseudo-religion (I don't really consider liberalism or LGBT or progressivism to be religions, but many here do), it would not surprise me if the same dynamic is at work. A Bluesky progressive doesn't need to worry about actual conservatives because everybody on Bluesky already has very strong anti-conservative antibodies. Jesse Singal, however, like J. K. Rowling, is already a liberal and present in liberal spaces - and unless you make sure to ostracise him clearly to send a message, less aware liberals might listen to him.
Of course, this argument can only do so much, because if you look at the handful of conservatives on Bluesky, they don't do much better. Here's David French on Bluesky defending the Tennessee trans case. Look at the comments - nobody is sparing him, or going, "Oh, well, he's a conservative, he's outside the tribe, whatever." He is being predictably and brutally attacked. (Particularly amusing considering how more right-wing people on Twitter brigade him now, but I guess you can't win.)
OliveTapenade
7d ago
No idea about him specifically - does it count if you hate political Twitch streamers in general? I have no idea about, uh, [googles], Steven Bonnell's specific ideas or personality, but in general I hate the trend of people relying on streamers or gamers for their political views. Even if he himself is great, I think it's an indictment of us collectively that the scene of which he is a part is significant.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
For what it's worth, I appreciate that you do continue challenging his nonsense. I've done so a little in the past, but SS is both indefatigable and evasive on the topic, such that after a few rounds it is easier and preferable to just ignore him. Even so, to see the same old posts about the Jews over and over, with minimal challenge, is rather dispiriting, so thank you for continuing to do what I've grown too weary of.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I think I've heard the name a time or two, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything about him.
There is probably a good discussion to be had about cult dynamics in Bay Area rationalism, but this doesn't seem to be it.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Sure, I'm willing to grant that. It's not a conclusion I'm inclined to quibble. Peer review is much less reliable than most people think it is, and a great many papers that are peer-reviewed and published are garbage.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I think I respond to this the same way I responded to the original affair - it is possible, after heavily editing a text so that it's saying something different, and deliberately lying to a small journal, to get a journal to publish something silly and then yell "gotcha!"
But what does that prove other than that people are sometimes gullible, or that if you're a bad actor you can eventually find a mark or two?
Just as the original "feminist Mein Kampf" communicated nothing of significance about feminism, this new "Christian nationalist Communist Manifesto" spoof communicates nothing significant about Christian nationalism.
Congratulations, James. You can trick people if you lie. So what?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Oops, fixed. Thanks.
On a minor note, I find it somewhat irritating that Freddie dismisses all cultural politics as meaningless, and then, barely a breath later, says that he dislikes or opposes Clinton due to him taking right-wing positions on cultural issues.
It can't be the case that simultaneously gay marriage in the 2010s wasn't a real win for the left, and that DOMA in the 90s was a real win for the right. If gay marriage was meaningless in the 10s, then surely opposing gay marriage was meaningless in the 90s. You can't have it both ways. Either cultural politics matter, or they don't.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
I think you're largely correct about the points in question, which just helps to show why Eco's ur-fascism should not be used as a diagnostic guide. Eco was trying, in a roundabout way, to describe a kind of mentality or psychology that he experienced as connected to authoritarian politics. Anyone with enough verbal flexibility can connect a bunch of Eco's points to any movement they don't like, and then accuse it of being fascist.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
I'm often a bit baffled as well - posts I write that I dash off in five minutes and think are relatively uninteresting sometimes get QCs, whereas posts that I invested a lot of effort and care into and think might be QC candidates don't make it. It's strange.
In this particular case I'd also like to raise my eyebrow a bit at the framing:
Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
This framing makes it look like my post was about gender, which... it wasn't? It happened to be in a thread whose top-level post was about gender, but it was part of a tangent about religion.
Maybe one day I will write a big post about gender, but that day is not today, and was not nine days ago either.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
A month late, but what the hey, I'm an M&M fan.
I don't think HoMM is a great example for this, particularly because in hindsight I believe 4 has had quite a positive reappraisal. 4 was very different to 3, which provoked a backlash and a lot of hate, but now that there have been many more games afterwards, including 5 (which was a very traditional return to the formula of 2 and 3), there's much less reason to hate 4. As a result, today 4 has a real fanbase of its own.
5 was then, as you say, a great success. Generally I believe 2, 3, and 5 are considered 'the good ones' of the HoMM series, and of those 2 is often overlooked because frankly everything 2 does well is done better in 3. In general it's 3 and 5. Those are the highest.
6 is another 4, in that it's an attempt to push the envelope and do something quite different. I'd argue that 6 has its merits, but in general it's thought of quite poorly, especially due to a truly dire attempt at online functionality that just does not work. Still, 6 experiments with a lot of interesting ideas (a persistent metagame system, hero alignment, specialist classes return from 4, town conversion, and an attempt to privilege factional unit synergies over just picking the strongest units of every faction along with buffing low-tier units), but they don't all work out (in particular the latter issue often led to cookie-cutter armies that made the game feel repetitive). In a better world, 6's good ideas would have been iterated on and refined for the future, while the bad ideas left out.
Unfortunately, 7 was a mess. 7 was at least conceptually an attempt at something like 5 - previous game experiment a bit much, let's go back to the formula. 7 is basically a straight-down-the-line imitation of 3 and 5. Unfortunately, 7 is also a low-budget affair that didn't have enough development time, so it reuses lots of graphical assets from 6, and it's slow and buggy and has horribly broken AI. You can look at 7 and see a bunch of neat ideas or things that would work if the game were not a dog's breakfast in terms of polish, but unfortunately, it is.
And it seems, tragically, that 7 killed the mainline HoMM series. There might have been a comeback, except Ubisoft didn't greenlight another one. Considering what a low-budget affair 7 was, and how else Ubisoft tried to exploit the IP with cheap spin-offs (with the notable exception of Clash of Heroes, which is fantastic), my guess is that turn-based strategy games just don't sell well enough for Ubisoft to consider them worth funding properly.
Except...
Now they're making Olden Era.
Now Olden Era looks like an indie-style game, closer to Songs of Conquest than to HoMM 6 or 7, and maybe that's a good sign. Maybe Unfrozen have the time and money to make a polished, high-quality release, and not chasing a triple-A style release will help it. I very much hope that's the case.
On the other hand... Ubisoft do not have a good record here, and their ability to screw up HoMM development is impressive, so a very high level of caution is warranted.
Meanwhile the Russian guys behind Horn of the Abyss are continuing to put out excellent, professional-level updates for the third game for free, so that is a strong consolation.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
I thought the Trump campaign was actually surprised by Biden dropping out? They'd been preparing to fight him, and had to pivot rapidly since many of their prepared lines of attack didn't work against the younger Harris.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
I was thinking of Robinson. I always remember an incident in his debate with Chris Rufo:
Robinson: But then I open the leading leftist magazine in the country, Jacobin, and I look at the headlines, and they are about things like the writers’ strike, or they’re about the fact that you can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment working full time.
Rufo: But would you say that Jacobin is representative of the—
Robinson: Of the left?
Rufo: Would you say Jacobin is the ideological force behind the largest movements of the left? I don’t think so.
Robinson: It’s the leading leftist magazine in the country. I think they’ve got a higher circulation than any other leftist publication.
Rufo: I don’t know about that.
This seems absurd, because it's obviously only possible to consider Jacobin "the leading leftist magazine in the country" if you have an extremely idiosyncratic definition of what counts as "leftist".
Whereas I'd say that most people would use the word 'left' to mean 'of America's two big political factions, the one that is further to the left'.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.
People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left. There is a sense among dedicated left-wing partisans that they are a tiny minority.
Like most of the narratives that people tell themselves about their own political tribes, this is probably false or at least illusionary, but the point is that when people complain about the absence of a left-wing media ecosystem, those probably are not people who regard most of the media as currently on the left.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Yes, with Islam specifically I think the implied belief is that 'Muslim' is basically an ethnicity or a race. This is silly, especially because Islam is very resolutely and explicitly non-racial and non-ethnic, but no one accused Western political discourse of making sense.
Yes, if an additional data point is needed, I had never heard of Tubman before there was some culture war nonsense about putting her face on money.
My opinion is that she seems like a silly, politics-driven addition to VII. I don't necessarily insist that leaders in Civ games always have formally occupied the office of head of state or what have you, but I do think that leaders in Civ should be people who can be meaningfully said to have been the leader of their civilisation. Gandhi was never prime minister of India, but he can be reasonably said to have been the leader of the Indian people in his time.
There's clearly no sense in which you could say that Harriet Tubman was ever the leader of the United States. She'd be fine as a Great Person in Civ, but... leader? No. That's silly.
More options
Context Copy link